10/12/2007 @ 1:00PM

Broadband Big Brothers

Few images capture the ugliness of Myanmar’s recent military crackdown quite like the photos of a Buddhist monk’s mud-covered corpse displayed in a slide show on the Web site of the Democratic Voice of Burma, a Burmese advocacy group based in Norway. The outraged messages posted in response show the Web’s power to connect supporters around the world with the long-suffering citizens of an isolated and repressed country.

Unfortunately, practically no one in Myanmar will see the site. That’s because the military junta’s squelching of protests extends deep into cyberspace: During the violence that killed dozens of protestors in recent weeks, Myanmar’s Internet was cut off from the outside world. In its aftermath, Burmese Web users have only three or four hours of access a day, according to a spokesman at Reporters Without Borders. Even then, government censors block most Web sites, sift through e-mails, and even take frequent screen shots of users’ computers in cyber-cafés.

Myanmar, the country formerly known as Burma, is just one of more than 50 countries around the world that keep their citizens from seeing pieces of the Internet. China attempts to block all online references to sensitive issues like Taiwanese independence and the Tiananmen Square protest. Censors in Iran block almost all content on dating and homosexuality.

Starting with a list of these “Internet Enemies,” as defined by Reporters Without Borders, and ordering them with data collected by the OpenNet Initiative–a consortium of universities that performs in-country testing on Internet filters–Myanmar places fourth in a ranking of Internet censoring regimes, behind Iran, China and Tunisia.

But the Myanmar government’s recent Internet shutdown offers researchers a unique perspective: Myanmar’s war on the Web put all the country’s powers of censorship into action, testing just how dictatorships limit–and fail to limit–communication in a world of increasingly digital dissidents.

The fact that Myanmar’s total blackout lasted only a week, for instance, gives hope to John Palfrey, a professor at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. The country’s ruling junta, which controls its only Internet service provider, couldn’t simply leave the Internet “off” without blocking its own communication, hampering the country’s economy, and making Myanmar look like even more of a pariah to the world, he argues.

If Burma can’t do without the Internet, neither can larger, more wired countries: Iran has about 60 times Myanmar’s number of servers connecting it to the Internet at large, by the CIA’s count. China has about 100,000 times as many. Shutting down these countries’ networks would be far more disruptive.

“The Internet is becoming so tied up with economic and social concerns–particularly for a new generation of “digital natives,” people who have grown up online–that it would be nearly impossible in most places in the world to get rid of access altogether,” Palfrey says. That means even if China or Iran faced a Burmese-style uprising, those countries would likely resort to selective filtering of political information rather than a complete shutdown.

But filters, argues security guru Bruce Schneier, are full of holes. Even in China, where a massive array of firewalls known as “the Golden Shield” inspects the contents of all Internet data moving into and out of the country, activists still find ways to spread their messages online.

Tricks include writing politically sensitive words in code or distributing messages via audio podcasts, which can’t be caught by text filters. For browsing forbidden parts of the Web, users employ programs like Tor and Psiphon to access “proxy servers” that disguise Web information by routing it through foreign countries.

Schneier says filters don’t work for the same reasons Net security is such a challenge. “Companies can’t even stop their employees from looking at porn in the office,” he says. “So how could a country control what its entire population does on the Web?”

Selective Web filtering certainly didn’t prevent Burmese dissidents from spreading their message. In the days leading up to the crackdown, bloggers and Facebook groups chronicled the unrest. Despite some of the most pervasive Web filtering in the world, photo and video evidence of the mounting violence was posted to sites like Yahoo’s Flickr and YouTube.

Tala Dowlatshahi of Reporters Without Borders says those smuggled dispatches helped prevent the kind of mass slaughter that occurred in Myanmar in 1988, when as many as 4,000 students were killed in protests. “If you juxtapose the situation then, when everyone was totally cut off, with now, you see that the Internet was really what kept the international community involved and documented what was happening,” she says.

But if governments can’t control the Net, they may co-opt it. Researchers like Palfrey and Schneier warn that rather than filter or block the Web, governments are increasingly using online surveillance to silently track dissident activity. In China, the government may even force the private sector to cooperate: One Chinese journalist was imprisoned with a 10 year sentence in 2005 after Yahoo! released details about his e-mail correspondence.

In this cat-and-mouse game between political activists and censors, the Internet will serve both sides, says John Palfrey. “I would put big money on the ability of activists to use the Net to rout around censorship,” he says. “But states are also turning to the network as a way to snoop and keep tabs on people.”

That means the power of the network for spreading contraband political messages will come at a price, says Bruce Schneier. “There will always be people who get their message out, but some will be sloppy, and some will get caught,” he warns. “The mice will win in the end. But in the meantime, the cats will be well fed.”